Maybe I'm missing something which is why this is a serious question. But the way it looks to me is that if a new card comes out that is significantly better at mining than the current lot, the result is that most miners will dump their cards on ebay, and rush out and buy the new card (at great expense). The net result is that hashrate goes up, difficulty goes up and everyone ends up making exactly the same as before, but with much greater capital cost.

The only people who might benefit are new miners and early adopters but even then the benefit will only be brief. It seems to me it would be a lot more profitable for everyone if there were no new cards being released. If the cards you have can continue to be profitable for longer surely that is better than having to dump them and buy new ones every year or so?

If everyone was mining with RX470's vs everyone mining with VEGA's everyone would be making exactly the same profit. So why is it such great news when a better card is released? All it seems to mean is greater capital expenditure to maintain the same income.

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Maybe I'm missing something which is why this is a serious question. But the way it looks to me is that if a new card comes out that is significantly better at mining than the current lot, the result is that most miners will dump their cards on ebay, and rush out and buy the new card (at great expense). The net result is that hashrate goes up, difficulty goes up and everyone ends up making exactly the same as before, but with much greater capital cost.

The only people who might benefit are new miners and early adopters but even then the benefit will only be brief. It seems to me it would be a lot more profitable for everyone if there were no new cards being released. If the cards you have can continue to be profitable for longer surely that is better than having to dump them and buy new ones every year or so?

If everyone was mining with RX470's vs everyone mining with VEGA's everyone would be making exactly the same profit. So why is it such great news when a better card is released? All it seems to mean is greater capital expenditure to maintain the same income.

That is very weird that people would sell off all their cards just to buy the newer cards. That is not what many people do, instead we build more rigs with the newer cards. In this term Vega is not worth the price, and for sure people will not be selling off their cards for Vega.

Maybe I'm missing something which is why this is a serious question. But the way it looks to me is that if a new card comes out that is significantly better at mining than the current lot, the result is that most miners will dump their cards on ebay, and rush out and buy the new card (at great expense). The net result is that hashrate goes up, difficulty goes up and everyone ends up making exactly the same as before, but with much greater capital cost.

The only people who might benefit are new miners and early adopters but even then the benefit will only be brief. It seems to me it would be a lot more profitable for everyone if there were no new cards being released. If the cards you have can continue to be profitable for longer surely that is better than having to dump them and buy new ones every year or so?

If everyone was mining with RX470's vs everyone mining with VEGA's everyone would be making exactly the same profit. So why is it such great news when a better card is released? All it seems to mean is greater capital expenditure to maintain the same income.

That is very weird that people would sell off all their cards just to buy the newer cards. That is not what many people do, instead we build more rigs with the newer cards. In this term Vega is not worth the price, and for sure people will not be selling off their cards for Vega.

Yeah but the net result is that the old cards become less and less profitable as more and more new cards in new rigs come online. It will get to the stage where the old cards are no longer profitable. It would be better for long term profitability if there was never a new card released. In which case, the old cards would continue to be profitable indefinitely and no reason to spend money upgrading just to maintain the same profit.

One of the costs of mining is that eventually your rig is no longer profitable because newer cards have increased the difficulty. If there were no new cards, profits would be greater because there would be no need to upgrade every couple of years.

Maybe I'm missing something which is why this is a serious question. But the way it looks to me is that if a new card comes out that is significantly better at mining than the current lot, the result is that most miners will dump their cards on ebay, and rush out and buy the new card (at great expense). The net result is that hashrate goes up, difficulty goes up and everyone ends up making exactly the same as before, but with much greater capital cost.

The only people who might benefit are new miners and early adopters but even then the benefit will only be brief. It seems to me it would be a lot more profitable for everyone if there were no new cards being released. If the cards you have can continue to be profitable for longer surely that is better than having to dump them and buy new ones every year or so?

If everyone was mining with RX470's vs everyone mining with VEGA's everyone would be making exactly the same profit. So why is it such great news when a better card is released? All it seems to mean is greater capital expenditure to maintain the same income.

That is very weird that people would sell off all their cards just to buy the newer cards. That is not what many people do, instead we build more rigs with the newer cards. In this term Vega is not worth the price, and for sure people will not be selling off their cards for Vega.

Yeah but the net result is that the old cards become less and less profitable as more and more new cards in new rigs come online. It will get to the stage where the old cards are no longer profitable. It would be better for long term profitability if there was never a new card released. In which case, the old cards would continue to be profitable indefinitely and no reason to spend money upgrading just to maintain the same profit.

One of the costs of mining is that eventually your rig is no longer profitable because newer cards have increased the difficulty. If there were no new cards, profits would be greater because there would be no need to upgrade every couple of years.

You're forgetting 2 things:

1. GPUs are not ment for mining coins. Their primary purpose is Gaming. Both are tied together with the ultimate goal of always being able to make games bigger, better, faster and more realistic2. Moore's law

There will always be new cards arriving on the market, can't change that.

Maybe I'm missing something which is why this is a serious question. But the way it looks to me is that if a new card comes out that is significantly better at mining than the current lot, the result is that most miners will dump their cards on ebay, and rush out and buy the new card (at great expense). The net result is that hashrate goes up, difficulty goes up and everyone ends up making exactly the same as before, but with much greater capital cost.

The only people who might benefit are new miners and early adopters but even then the benefit will only be brief. It seems to me it would be a lot more profitable for everyone if there were no new cards being released. If the cards you have can continue to be profitable for longer surely that is better than having to dump them and buy new ones every year or so?

If everyone was mining with RX470's vs everyone mining with VEGA's everyone would be making exactly the same profit. So why is it such great news when a better card is released? All it seems to mean is greater capital expenditure to maintain the same income.

You forget that humans are GREEDY. Why do people mine? To make money. Any minor little advantage they can get, people will take. They try and stay ahead of the pack. Just (sad) basic human instincts

Well, thats how capitalism works. But I don't really think people are going to sell their gpu's just to buy new Vega cards. There were rumors about Vega getting 80-100 hashrates, but now people know that it isn't true.

Moore's Law has been having issues of late - and is set for a MAJOR stumble after the next production nodes actually hit full production, as pretty much EVERYONE is now saying "Silicon has reached the end of the road" (IBM and Intel said it first).

IBM is already moving away from pure Silicon for wafers (they're using a hybrid Ge/Si wafer on their next node) - but even hybrid stuff like that is likely to have a short lifespan, as feature size has been hitting Quantum effects for a long time and each time a new "smaller" node is worked on, the quantum effects have gotten worse.

There was *ONE* rumour about Vega hitting 70-100 Mh/s on ETH that was very widely repeated (rumour not rumor because it was a Brit site that started it).